booting a CD with a Floppy
 

Hi, i just aquired an old Dell WorkStation 400 and i want to put linux on it... one problem... the cd drive does not get checked by the bios, there for the computer will not see the Boot CD. It does see the floppy drive. Is there a way to make a floppy that simply points my computer to look at the cd drive and see my Boot CD.

thanks in advance!

You should be able to download a Smart Boot Manager floppy and do what you're saying.

Otherwise, you might pick a distro that can do a netinstall with a boot floppy, like Debian.

Or try this guy's method with Grub for NT or loadlin.

Some distro's come with a bootimage that you can write to floppy. Last time I used that was with RH7.3, so not sure if that's still the case nowadays.

you might want to investigate why your cdrom is not being checked by the bios. these are often the problems with master/slave and ide-cable configurations.

Being able to boot from CD is a relatively new feature. Many motherboard manufacturers did not provide this capability until 1999/2000 or later.

thanx for pointing that out. i too think i am relatively new to it, AFAIKnew every motherboard and bios provided it. but then i haven't seen all that is there (especially old ones). anyway, i gained some new knowledge here.